The paperwork of the world's politest market, read with appropriate suspicion.
Issue 01 — in preparationPublished from Tokyo · in English
Roughly ¥350 trillion sits in the bank accounts of Japanese companies that have no particular plans for it. About 40% of the listed market trades below the value of its own furniture. Both facts are disclosed in full, on time, to the letter of the law — in Japanese, in a filing system most of the world's money has never opened.
This letter opens it.
We read the annual reports, the earnings releases, the large-holding disclosures and the trade press, and we write down in English what they actually say. The interesting part is rarely the number. It is the sentence on page 47 that the company was obliged to include and hoped you would not translate.
No ratings. No target prices. No recommendations — not as modesty, but as policy. If you cannot tell what the desk thinks by the end of a note, read it again.
Fig. — Every value falls inside the reference range. The reference range was fitted to the patient.
Mondays
The Week's Paperwork
Everything filed last week that mattered, and the two or three things that will. Short, and on time, because that is the entire promise.
Fortnightly
Essays
When a thing is worth three thousand words — a company nobody covers, a rule change nobody read, a habit of corporate Japan that stopped making sense in 1997 and continues anyway.
Continuous
Company files
One page per listed company, all ~3,900 of them, built from the filings and rewritten by the machine each time the company files. Facts only; what the desk makes of them lives in the essays.